1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to mail piece handling machines. The present invention relates specifically to machines for preparing a plurality of pre-printed unaddressed, non-alike mail pieces from un-predetermined sources into grouped bundles organized in a manner to receive low postal rates, the aggregated bundles constituting a "mailing", for delivery to a post office such as the U.S. Postal Service.
2. Description of the Related Art
A large number of merchants maintain their customer data bases on computers which they use to preform several functions, one of which is to print addresses for pieces they wish to mail to selected customers.
For the most part the merchants print the addresses on lapels, apply the labels to the mail pieces, and mail them at the first class rate because postal regulations are too complicated to obtain a lower rate. Several large merchants do use the lower discount rate available because they can afford mailing services which apply the rules and regulations of the United States Postal Service to obtain the lower rate. Small volume merchants are often unable to obtain these favorable rates due to lack of knowledge or low mailing volume.
In general postal rates are dependent upon the degree of specificity of addressing and the amount of presorting which is done by the merchant or his mailing service prior to delivery of the mail to the post office.
the United States Postal Service has, and is, converting to automatic mail handling equipment in order for the Postal Service to handle large volumes of mail at a faster rate.
Due to this automation, lower postal rates are available for mail pieces which are addressed with machine readable addressing such as bar codes or the like. Further, mail pieces sorted into mailings according to the zip code first three digits, last two digits, down to zip+4 digits and the mail carrier route level, resulting in progressively lower rates. However, a minimum number of pieces must be in each grouping to qualify for the lower postal rates.
It will be readily appreciated that a small volume merchant would lack the number of pieces necessary to achieve a mailing qualifying for the low rate available to mailings sorted in bundles down to the carrier route level, even if his customers were concentrated in a single metropolitan area.
Heretofore, the known apparatuses for the automatic addressing and sorting of mail pieces into mailings have been focused on pieces of known size and thickness coming from a single source or merchant. Some known apparatuses, exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 4,800,506, have performed these functions by first addressing the mailing pieces, then tracking the pieces with optical character readers (OCR) and operating upon the pieces according to the information received by the OCR . The complexity of these OCR apparatuses makes them very expensive and, therefore, unobtainable to the small merchant or mailing service wishing to use them.
Another type of known apparatus, exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 5,053,955, creates a merged data base of merchants' customer address lists grouped by the lowest postal rate. Then using a corresponding file of information to print on each mailing piece according to the merchant's needs, the apparatus serially prints and addresses a are determined postcard-format mail piece for each addressee according to the grouped address list.
Both of the above prior art apparatuses contemplate very large mailings to be bundled in order to achieve the economies of scale necessary to economically operate such machinery. Further, each exemplary prior art apparatus "knows" what type, size and thickness, of mail piece hereinafter "piece", it is to process before sending it to the piece-handling portion of the apparatus.
The average merchant, however, is unable to achieve the economies of scale necessary to utilize the known apparatuses. The average merchant has his own unique fliers, usually single sheets of paper, printed by a printing company and wishes to address and mail these pieces at the lowest cost. A mailing service desiring to serve the average merchant must accommodate these preprinted, unaddressed, non-alike low volume mailings without prior knowledge of the type of pieces to be mailed.
A need therefore exists for an affordable apparatus which will take several merchants' address lists, sort and merge the addresses according to postal rates in order to achieve the volume of mail necessary to obtain a bundle with low postal rates, by developing the lowest rate groupings for these pieces.
The needed apparatus must then take the unaddressed pieces of whatever size and/or type the merchant has had printed, and commingle and, address them according to postal regulations, and segregate the grouped pieces into bundles to produce mailings deliverable to the post office for delivery at the lowest postal rates.